The search for a culprit for the Northern Rock fiasco shifted from the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, to his deputy, Sir John Gieve, last night after MPs demanded an explanation for the first run on a high street bank in over a century.

Sketch: Where's Tucker?" whispered someone in the oak-panelled hush of the Treasury select committee room. This was the perfect stage for the foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It: the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, had dithered while Northern Rock crumbled, and now there were calls for his resignation. Tucker, a foul-mouthed Scot, could surely reduce this small, bespectacled banker to dust.

A request by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for an official tour of Ground Zero while he is at the United Nations next week met a collective response that was classically New Yorker: Fuhgeddaboutit!

Almost 1,000 Buddhist monks, protected by a larger crowd of onlookers, marched through Burma's biggest city for a third day yesterday and pledged to keep alive the most sustained protests against the military government in at least a decade.

Obituary: For 26 years from 1964, Jim Arnison, who has died aged 82, was northern correspondent for the Daily Worker (after 1966, the Morning Star). He was never happier than when covering the industrial battles of the era.